Wildlife and Nature Books Online in Association with Amazon.com
Wildlife and Nature Books OnlineShop in UK CurrencyWildlife Search Engine
Search Advanced Search
 Location:  Home » Books » Literary Theory » Image-Music-Text  
Image-Music-Text
Image-Music-Text
Author: Roland Barthes
Publisher: Hill and Wang
Category: Book

List Price: $16.00
Buy New: $9.53
You Save: $6.47 (40%)



New (28) from $9.53

Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars 4 reviews
Sales Rank: 38487

Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 220
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.2 x 0.7

ISBN: 0374521360
Dewey Decimal Number: 809
EAN: 9780374521363
ASIN: 0374521360

Publication Date: July 1, 1978
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: GREAT BUY!Brand New From US Distributor! WE ARE A 5 STAR SELLER with OVER 3,500,000 BOOKS SOLD!!! OVER ~ 600,000 FEEDBACKS ~ POSTED!!!

Also Available In:

  • Unknown Binding - Image, music, text (Fontana communications series)
  • Paperback - Image-Music-Text (Flamingo S)
  • Paperback - Image, music, text
  • Paperback - Image Music Text
  • Paperback - Image-Music-Text

Similar Items:

  • Mythologies
  • Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
  • Illuminations: Essays and Reflections
  • The Pleasure of the Text
  • Elements of Semiology

Editorial Reviews:

Amazon.com Review
Roland Barthes, the French critic and semiotician, was one of the most important critics and essayists of this century. His work continues to influence contemporary literary theory and cultural studies. Image-Music-Text collects Barthes's best writings on photography and the cinema, as well as fascinating articles on the relationship between images and sound. Two of Barthes's most important essays, "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative" and "The Death of the Author" are also included in this fine anthology, an excellent introduction to his thought.

Product Description
These essays, as selected and translated by Stephen Heath, are among the finest writings Barthes ever published on film and photography, and on the phenomena of sound and image. The classic pieces "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative" and "The Death of the Author" are also included.



Customer Reviews:

3 out of 5 stars i--m--t   May 31, 2008
 0 out of 3 found this review helpful

Heath selected well for this volume, the essays flow well into one another and it proves to be quick reading.

"Ethnocentric" in the other review is laughable. Suppose it's not ethnocentric as long as one is biased for others, so long as it be against oneself. Cultural Marxists ought to be too busy putting their efforts against the State to have time to indulge in these sorts of things, ah, but they're far too busy earning tenure at a federally funded university to take note; they have had their sabbatical request approved by the Women's Studies department and are off to write that big diatribe against Religion and Intolerance and Poverty they've always dreamed of ever since they were a little fetus. So much invective, so little time!



5 out of 5 stars Death of the Author, Rhetoric of the Image, etc.   August 15, 2003
 9 out of 9 found this review helpful

A note: these essays were not only translated, but also selected by Heath.

A series of essays about the composition of images (aural, textual, and visual). A good collection for people interested in his thoughts on cinema and structuralist treatment of visual form. I'm a long way from my university infatuation with semiotics, but I still find this thought-provoking to return to and an ongoing pleasure to read.



5 out of 5 stars An excellent introduction to Barthes   August 20, 2001
 10 out of 17 found this review helpful

More accessible than some of his others, this book nevertheless exhibits the same pyrotechnic, questing intelligence that makes everything from his hand a delight to read. Excellent translation maintains a high order language as thrilling as it is conceptually sophisticated. The argument is not an academic one; rather, this is speculative writing at its most adventurous. A title for those who consider the brain their favorite organ.


5 out of 5 stars STRONGLY recommended for anyone with insomnia   October 30, 1997
 57 out of 114 found this review helpful

Roland Barthes strikes me as an unreliable logician and a philosopher that one should be wary of. His premises are largely unsupported (or supported only weakly) and his statements often paradoxical or vastly generalized. His vocabulary is of such an unnecessarily high level that it strikes me as a smokescreen for faulty logic. Furthermore, I side with John Irving in his defense of Kurt Vonnegut: the assumption that what is easy to read must have been easy to write is acceptable only in those who do not write. Note the following excerpt from a passage on page 42 of the text:

the letter of the image corresponds in short to the first degree of intelligibility (below which the reader would perceive only lines, forms, and colours), but this intelligibility remains virtual by reason of its very poverty, for everyone from a real society always disposes of a knowledge superior to the merely anthropological and perceives more than just the letter.

"Everyone" and "always" are two dangerous words, as most logicians can tell you. One exception disproves the premise, and a diproved premise weakens the argument. The word "real" reveals a bias--what does Barthes mean by a "real" society? It seems, at any rate, a thinly disguised ethnocentric snobbery. "A knowledge superior to the merely anthropological"--why is anthropological knowledge "merely" anthropogical? What, then, is superior to it? and why? I'm not being defensive--I honestly don't know. "Since it is both evictive and sufficient, it will be understood that . . ." "Sufficient"? Sufficient for what? "Evictive"? Does he mean "evocative"? Frankly, I'm not sure anything WILL be understood.

Buy this book for a sleeping pill, a gag gift, or an insufferable class. Otherwise, don't worry about getting literate--in this case, it's overrated. His theories could be expressed in a much simpler way. And then, once you understand them, you find that the ones that do hold up are unquantifiable and inapplicable.

Wildlife, nature and the Environment

Sponsored Links

Wildlife

Discover Wildlife using our Google Wildlife Search

Learn how to get your own Amazon Book shop